A standard career ladder document is often aggressively detailed, listing out competencies, delivery outcomes, behavioral qualifications, technical achievements, and more, for what it takes to reach each level in an organization. What is usually missing from those same documents is any sense of the pyramidal shape of the structures they define. That is, at each level of the ladder, there are fewer and fewer opportunities. If a team of ten engineers each work hard and meet the requirements of a senior engineer, but the organization only has budget for two senior engs, only two people are getting promoted. Promotions are both scarce and competitive; they create winners and losers.

What happens to the losers?

Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf ask this question of military dictatorships, digging into historical data from Argentina and elsewhere. While it’s often presumed that dictatorships operate on nepotism rather than merit, they find that merit-based systems are in fact common among authoritarian regimes, even existing alongside flagrant patronage. This is perhaps not unexpected, as a regime that operated purely on nepotism would surely collapse from incompetence sooner rather than later. Perhaps more surprising is that a merit-based system can still give rise to horrific violence. The reasons for that emerge as an answer to the above question: those who don’t make it up the ladder in the usual way must find other avenues to succeed. Gläßel and Scharpf write:

By career pressure, we understand an individual’s fear resulting from any impediment to their continued employment or advancement within an organization. In order to salvage their careers, pressured individuals have an incentive to pursue one of two extreme strategies. First, they may force their way up. By forcing, we understand officers’ participation in a coup attempt in the hope of commending themselves to successor regimes. Second, they may detour and go the extra mile. By detouring, we refer to officers applying for unpopular assignments where they can stand out and demonstrate their value in the hope that their loyalty will be rewarded by the current regime.

Gläßel and Scharpf, Making a Career in Dictatorship, page 12

The unpopular assignments are the dirty work of surveillance, intimidation, detention, torture, extrajudicial murders, and so on. The usefulness of the detouring path offers one reason for why authoritarian regimes often have vast security apparatuses: the dirty work gives pressured officers a path to continued employment that looks like a better bet than fomenting a coup. In other words, the security apparatus is a good place for the regime to park surplus workers, directing them to turn their ire on the people instead of the regime itself.

The mechanism by which both detouring and forcing are produced? The lowly career ladder.

We argue that three basic characteristics of security organizations influence the career opportunities of officers with important implications for their incentives and behaviors. First, security organizations are hierarchical. Each step on the career ladder brings additional power, pay, and prestige. This is why most individuals seek to climb up in the hierarchy. Second, security organizations are pyramid-shaped. There is an abundance of positions at the bottom but only few lucrative posts at the top. Individuals who want to climb up thus face organizational bottlenecks and competition for promotions. Third, in the organizations, promotion systems define the requirements that individuals have to meet in order to climb up. These requirements can be formal qualifications, individual traits, or personal connections. What unifies them is that those who fail to meet the requirements have little chances of improving their position. These are the individuals who face career pressure, and who are most likely to either detour or force their way up.

Gläßel and Scharpf, Making a Career in Dictatorship, page 12

Obviously, the same mechanisms exist in corporate environments, where detouring may take the form of fraud, embezzlement, bribery, or the pursuit of any number of unethical business practices. Someone who has been routinely turned down for a promotion in a more-or-less above ground organization may be willing to take a job with the startup that sees breaking the law as the fastest route to product-market fit. Or they may see it as entirely rational for them to volunteer for the new product line which is moving at a rapid pace but which is definitely not following best practices for keeping kids safe. You get the idea: career pressure in any context drives people to places we would rather they not go.

This is not an exculpatory revelation. People are responsible for their choices, even in an unequal and unfair world. No one who chooses the work of disappearing my neighbors gets my sympathy. But surely we need to also acknowledge the systems that make those choices appealing, and work to undo them. Gläßel and Scharpf note that one of the ways to interrupt this pattern is to offer people a viable escape path; that is, give them stable, decently-paid, and respectable jobs they could flee to as an alternative to doing the dirty work. To which, yes, of course. We already had plenty of reasons to make good work a major policy goal. But if good work also keeps people from joining the secret police? All the better.

But I’ll go a step further: if one of the outcomes of pyramid-shaped hierarchical systems is a group of losers who may, out of desperation, be recruited into doing harm in order to save face or provide for their family, then maybe that system has to go. Over the past many years, there’s been a concerted effort across industries to revise career ladders to be more equitable. That effort has included attempts to rigorously define and measure competencies and achievements in order to rule out (or, at the least, drastically reduce) inherent biases that reward privileged groups while punishing minoritized ones. But is any system that routinely creates winners and losers really equitable? If one outcome of a hierarchy is that there are always some people who fear for their livelihood, what exactly have we achieved? Maybe all the energy put into making better career ladders should instead be used to figure out how we should work together once we tear every last ladder down.